


Luminosity

by Anarchyinplasma



Series: Life and Times of a Risen [6]
Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, Gun-smithing, post Forsaken
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-03
Updated: 2020-07-03
Packaged: 2021-03-05 05:07:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25058989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anarchyinplasma/pseuds/Anarchyinplasma
Summary: After Cayde's untimely death, Arcturus discovers the legacy he left the Hunters under his command.
Series: Life and Times of a Risen [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/643955
Kudos: 2





	Luminosity

**Author's Note:**

> Not 100% on this one to be honest, but I like it enough to post, so I hope someone enjoys. As always please do let me know if anyone has any criticism, I'd love to improve this one because I feel like it could be better and I just don't know how.

Arcturus heaved a sigh as he set foot in the new tower. It still didn’t feel right to him, seven hundred years of the previous one wasn’t something that was going to easily be overwritten in his memory; especially with the broken and beaten husk of the previous tower looming over the city as a constant reminder.

He stuck to the late evening shadows as he moved down to the hanger, word had it that The Dare was in effect, and he didn’t fancy needing to find a way to weasel out of it if he found anyone from the praxic order. Thankfully the room was mostly empty, only Holliday tinkering with a sparrow and the usual frames directing ships arriving late in the evening (mostly fairly well known Hunters he noted with no surprise).

He noticed Amanda glance up as he moved to Cayde’s former desk, but she didn’t say anything, even as he started to shuffle through the papers still strewn over the desk in what Cayde would have referred to as “organised chaos”, and what Arcturus would refer to as “a bloody great mess”. Undeterred by his inability to find what he was looking for, he checked the rest of the space, the drawers, the hidden drawers, the under floor storage space, the secret compartment in that, and even the knives embedded into the map, searching for any trace of the clue Cayde had told him he’d left.

A spanner clinked onto the desk beside him as Amanda finally got curious enough to put down the sparrow she was elbow-deep in and approach.  
“What’cha lookin’ for?” She asked, baffled. Arcturus sighed and reopened a drawer to check again.  
“Before he died we were working on something special. Something very very unique, he sent me a message before he jumped to the reef, told me to check his desk for a location…” he trailed off, running his fingers underneath the heavy steel of the desk itself until he found a seam. Holliday slipped the spanner into her belt and joined him in lifting part of the top of the desk up on hidden hinges, revealing a number of compartments containing all sorts of unique trinkets and data-cards with labels such as “Stratos - VoC” and “Arcturus - T”.

“Wow,” Amanda let out a little whistle as her eyes swept over the highly custom gun components and precisely machined glimmering metal, “he was holding out on me”. Arcturus gave a smirk.  
“In inner Hunter circles, hardcore custom mods are serious business. Cayde being vanguard gave us access to intel on some crazy crazy stuff.” He pulled out all the components in the little box marked as his and closed the desk again, clearing out a space from all of the former Vanguard’s papers to examine them more closely.

What he had been left with were really strange, little golden spikes of machined metal, like the thorns on a rose, Callahan floated over his shoulder, scanning the little data chip and adopting a look that was as close to surprise as a ghost could get once he digested the information.

“What?” Arcturus raised an eyebrow at his ghost. Callahan gave him the ghost’s equivalent of a shrug.  
“Just ‘bathe them in light, put them on the gun and see what happens’ apparently”

Arcturus sighed  
“That’s it? How do they even work, what are they even for?” His ghost gave him a look and imitated his sigh.  
“Something about micro-re-woven light sensitive Hadium? These must have cost him an absolute fortune to produce”  
“Hadium?” Arcturus’ eyebrows went into his hairline. “Wow okay.” He spun a gravity well between his fingers, lengthening it into a ribbon of amethyst that wrapped into a double helix of light and took the shape of a woven arrow. Gently, Arcturus arranged the tiny little blocks of hadium metal into a line, then laid his arrow on top.

Instead of the usual reaction with a solid surface, that being an implosion into a deadfall anchor; Arcturus watched with interest as his arrow flickered, before slowly fading as the tiny flakes of hadium absorbed the light greedily, humming on the edge of the visible spectrum as they drank the last of it in.  
“What gun are these for?” Amanda asked in a half whisper.

In reply, Arcturus pulled Thorn out from behind his waist and laid the gun on the table.  
“Is that Thorn!?” Holliday half screeched, involuntarily withdrawing from the weapon on sight.  
“Shhh!” Arcturus hushed her. “It’s not like it was,” he explained, hurried, “the gun has been cleansed of the darkest taint, but it’s still not exactly safe to use for a long period, I guess Cayde was hoping that tuned hadium will be a more permanent counter balance.” He turned to Callahan again.

“So did he say how to use these little things or…”  
“No, just to ‘put them on the gun’, that’s all” Callahan sounded a little disappointed, but Amanda, over her knee-jerk reaction, had a little idea.  
“I got a weldin’-torch and some free time, want ‘em on there good an proper?”  
“Sounds good” agreed Arcturus without hesitation, gathering up all the little pieces of metal and his gun and taking them both over to Holliday’s workshop.

“Can you remove some of this… whatever it is?” She asked, vaguely gesturing to the expanded profile of the gun. Arcturus pulled his knife from his vambrace.  
“Some of it yes, and it’s Hive chiton.” He started to carve away at it as Holliday made a disgusted “eww” sound and warmed up her welding torch.

Once the chiton had been mostly removed from Thorn and the torch brought to a suitable temperature for melting hadium, Amanda carefully placed the little blocks of metal onto the side of the weapon and blasted them with full heat. Immediately the hadium started to liquify, running molten and forming blisteringly hot loops of glittering metal wrapped around the carved shell that had once been Thorn.

Carefully, the mechanic poured a slow trickle of machine coolant over the solidifying surface, watching as the metal set and transformed into long looping strands of gold winding around the body of the gun.

Gingerly, Arcturus picked the gun up and tested the weighting. Spinning it on his finger before giving it a mock quick-draw.

He took off the behind the waist holster for Thorn that usually sat between the small of his back and his cloak and let out a mild sound of frustration at how much modding he'd need to do. Holiday however, ever the pragmatist, broke two angle brackets down to size and added support so the gun could fit just as comfortably into the old holster.

She'd just started attaching the bracing to the holster when Arcturus heard the clatter of many footsteps approaching the hanger.

With a silent finger to his lips directed at Holliday, Arcturus retreated from view around a nearby corner as a group of Warlocks, (a voice in his head that sounded quite a bit like Cayde informed him that the proper collective group noun was an "annoyance" of Warlocks), entered the hanger led by a young exo he didn't recognise but who was wearing a praxic symbol on her sleeve.

He stifled a groan as they marched confidently up to Holliday, and stifled a laugh a moment later when the women who was addressed as "Chief Shipwright of Tower and Extra Planetary Missions: Amanda Holliday" replied to her with a lazy  
"yuh huh babes? Gimme a second here…"  
“Several Hunters have been sighted down here” the Warlock said in a no-nonsense tone. “We want to know where they are now.”  
Holliday gave a non-commital wavy gesture.  
“I dunno babes, around, they ain’t my favourites after-all” she blatantly dragged her eyes up the noticeably flustered Warlock and Arcturus struggled even harder to hold in his laughter.

“I will not have this disrespect!” the Warlock almost screeched, “What are you working on there, is that Hunter gear!?”  
“Uh huh…” Holliday drawled, showing the Hunter’s sigil on Arcturus’ holster to her more clearly, “there a problem with that...babe?” she paused, drinking in the open mix between contempt and embarrassment on the Exo’s face.  
“Where is the Hunter who it belongs to?” The young Praxic Warlock was visibly flustered by now, and Arcturus could see Holliday struggling to maintain her lackadaisical flirting act instead of bursting into laughter.  
“He’s on Mars, solo trek, just left” Holliday smiled innocently, “It’s a gift for when he gets back, if you wanna wait the next 6 months then just pull up a chair I’ll be happy to spend some time with you.” She threw in an overtly salacious wink and gestured to a spare chair in the corner with the hand holding the rivet gun before punching a few more rivet’s into Arcturus’ new holster.

With a huff the Warlock spun on her heel and left, followed by her apparently extraneous entourage. Arcturus emerged from his hiding place with a broad grin painted across his face.  
“Do you normally pick up girls like that kiddo?” he ruffled Amanda’s hair affectionately and she snickered.  
“She’ll be back, watch me.” Arcturus snickered back.  
“Yeah okay, invite me to the wedding.”  
“I will, and you’ll bankroll the open bar.” In the back of his mind, Arcturus had an inkling that taking that bet might be a bad idea.

Five minutes of idle chatter later, the holster was finished, and as Arcturus reattached it, he warned her to expect some other Hunters like Stratos and Laila, Cayde wanted the mods out in the wild afterall.

“I have something else for you by the way” he handed Holliday a strange looking token, carved out of a chip of stone with the Hunter’s universal symbol on one side and a single arrow on the other. “That’s one of my markers,” he explained, “every famous (or infamous) Hunter has one, especially if we move in the inner circles, Shadowsmiths and the like. They’re all different, but they’re recogniseable. We use them for a lot of things, for example show that to anyone who comes looking for a mod and they’ll know they can trust you. It might also help you get into a few of the well known Hunter haunts around the city, if you’re in need of a drink.” He grinned. “They’re also a currency, of sorts, if a Hunter gives you their mark, they owe you, big time.” He palmed several more to show her, an onyx token with a silver arcblade, a pale pink token carved from quartz with greek symbol on it, a green and gold striped affair with an engraving of a cobra’s head. “It’s not a debt you give back, if you have a token you’re owed for life, we use them to mark cache’s and such out in the wilds too. So welcome to the inner club little Hunter, we’ve got your back.” He gave Holliday a one-armed hug and another ruffle of the hair as he had when she was a child, hanging around the early SRL racers in the hanger, before he turned to leave.

“Oh and one more thing” Arcturus said from the doorway, “don’t let your lady Warlock friend see that, they’re a personal thing.” Holliday nodded to him and mimed zipping her lips. Arcturus gave a thumbs up and left, back to the wilds where he was safe from every Hunter’s worst nightmare.


End file.
